Members of H20 Photo, the winning team of the Bend Startup Weekend, are experiencing the challenges of getting a startup company off the ground.

Troy Smith, who repairs leather and vinyl upholstery at Color Glo International in Bend, took his idea of an electronically controlled underwater camera housing to the Startup Weekend last month.

“I had this idea, but I didn’t know what to do with it on my own and I didn’t know if it was a good idea or not,” Smith said.

What’s new about Smith’s housing design, said Steve Minar, another member of the H20 Photo team, is its reliance on a single USB cord penetrating the housing to control functions such as zoom, focus, shutter and flash. The design eliminates the need for numerous holes in a housing, reducing the potential for leakage. And the design is universal for any type of camera, he said. Currently, each type of camera requires a different housing.

But while the idea landed them the grand prize, winning the event was just the beginning for H20 Photo.

“It’s not a fairy-tale story where we’re all going to get rich,” Smith said. “We’re still working on really identifying if there is a good opportunity, and where in the market that is.”

After the Startup Weekend, Smith, Minar and their two other partners attended Startup Weekend Next, a three-week business facilitation program, to see if the idea had potential to transform into a company.

“The goal was to determine if there really is a market for these, how big that market is and what the value is that we have to offer,” Smith said, referring to the Next program.

Although the other two members of the startup team are no longer involved, Minar said he’s still pursuing the project with Smith, trying to validate the business concept before putting a lot of money into moving forward.

“We still think we have a really good idea, but we’ve learned the market is smaller than we hoped and there are two existing companies that have used a similar approach and didn’t have very good results in the market,” Minar said.

Minar said controlling the camera electronically via a single cable would make the housing easier and cheaper to manufacture. Currently, housings cost from $1,500 to more than $5,000, he said. Reducing the cost, he said, would allow more people to buy them, expanding the market and taking existing market share from other housing companies.

While Smith and Minar have their reservations, Walt Bolton, a co-owner of Central Oregon Diving who takes underwater video and sells housings, thinks there’s a need for the duo’s device.

“If they can do what they’re intending to do with their device, it’s very clever,” Bolton said. “I think they can do it and be very, very competitive.”

What’s the Bend Startup Weekend?

Held in November, the Bend Startup Weekend gave entrepreneurs 54 hours to pitch an idea and launch a startup company. The Bend event was part of a worldwide program that’s an affiliate of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a Kansas City, Mo., nonprofit dedicated to entrepreneurship.

Following the Startup Weekend, a three-week program called Next was held in Bend to help give Startup Weekend teams additional coaching. A four-week Next program launched in more than 25 cities Nov. 28, according to the Startup Weekend website.

For more information about Bend Startup Weekend, visit http://bend.startupweekend.org/.

For more information about Startup Weekend’s Next program, visit http://startupweekend.org/2012/10/30/introducing-next/.